Making Your Own DVD’s

For some of us, our exposure to DVD’s comes in the form of going to a store and purchasing or renting a disk to take home and watch on our standard TV or home theatre system. How all this is possible is not really of much interest to us. Maybe we know that DVD is short for something along the lines of “Digital Video Disk” or “Digital Versatile Disk” (dictionaries vary a bit on the actual words but all say much the same thing). These vary from the original compact disks that came out as superior replacements for music and sound that used to be recorded into the grooves in a vinyl record (disk). We probably know that the DVD type is also referred to as an optical disk and that lasers are involved somehow in the recording and playback stages.

Armed with such vague knowledge, can we attempt to start producing our own DVD disks? These days, almost anyone should be able to do just that. Assuming we also own some sort of computer that is reasonably up to date, it is most likely that it will no longer have the earlier style built in CD drive; this was first upgraded to a DVD drive and, these days, a DVD drive that can be used for both reading information already stored on a disk and for adding new information onto a disk. Hence, we have the hardware to record anything we like onto blank disks. Of course, those disks must be of the (R) recordable type.

We have chosen the material that we wish to record and we have installed the necessary programs into our computer to enable us to transfer (burn) our data onto a blank DVD-R disk. We are ready to go; but, we get a warning message saying that our material is too large to fit onto the disk. This is probably because our disk is a single layer one that can only hold around 4.7 GB of data. This sounds a lot but many movies can easily exceed this amount.

Unless we want to cut the movie short or use two disks, we will need to look at disks with dual recoding layers. Known as DVD+R DL disks, this type can record up to 8.5 GB. Please remember that you may need to purchase special equipment for both recoding and viewing of your DVD+R DL disks.